


Let Me Go, for the Dawn has Broken

by EverySoul



Series: Paalm Rights [1]
Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Divergence, Fictional Religion & Theology, Gen, Paalm Rights, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28510920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverySoul/pseuds/EverySoul
Summary: It isn't easy to struggle with God.
Series: Paalm Rights [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088489
Comments: 9
Kudos: 23





	Let Me Go, for the Dawn has Broken

**Author's Note:**

> Paalm did quite a bit wrong actually, but still deserved better. Source: I'm Jewish.

Paalm was alive, which was awful.

She'd been paralyzed, barely alive, barely conscious, her skin a coffin and the rest of her the corpse clawing desperately for freedom. She'd been buried so many times now, and it was easily her least favorite method of body disposal.

And then she'd been a mistwraith for what had felt like hours or days or maybe weeks, consciousness bleeding out over itself like her form had spilled free of its skeleton, an endless downwardness in the abyssal nescience offered by the absence of her spikes. A ruin of its own, awash in the sanguinary effluvium of emotions no longer rooted in any higher processes.

And all of that was _still_ an improvement over thought.

Her body cocooned the metals driven into her before she could make it stop, and her thoughts spun themselves into coherence, senses manifesting themselves with the same gentleness as the Hemalurgic spikes. A lesser kandra would have remembered nothing. But she wasn't a lesser kandra, and the spikes in her were copper, the blessings she'd worn in her old life as Harmony's puppet. Her memories were as crystalline as her bones.

Which had been shattered, of course. Her tendons hadn't formed as they'd been supposed to, because the bones offered her no leverage. Her form was a twisted parody of a human, no real features save for what was necessary for senses.

This too, wouldn't have stopped her for long, save that her mind was no longer her own either.

Two spikes, both of Harmony's metals. Razor-sharp clarity. As much hers as the mists belonged to an Allomancer.

Her eyes, newly furnished with nerves, flicked around her with zinc speed. She recognized the stone patterns of a prison far from Elendel. Absurd, frankly, to keep her here, when the bars were on the inside.

TenSoon stood guard over her, in his usual wolfhound form, expression inscrutable because he was a damned dog. Her brother had always been sentimental. Paalm had found that by measures charming, stupid, irritating, and adorable, and right now it filled her with a rage that turned her inaction into agony.

Her body had been stolen. Her mind had been stolen. Once again, only one thing remained to her, and when it had already been denied her once, she didn't hold out a lot of hope for the second try.

Still, she hadn't lived 1100 years putting aside options because they _maybe_ wouldn't work out.

Paalm killed herself again.

It was easy. Not immediate— but no more than a few seconds of focused thought, a signal that would spread through the tissues that composed her, annihilating herself in a way that was supposed to stick.

And then she remembered that she wanted to live. The world held so much by way of opportunity, beauty, things that meant that even when there was no reason left to go on, going on was still worthwhile. The signals stopped before they could reach further than desire.

"How _dare_ you," Paalm spat, words dribbling out through her broken jaw. TenSoon sat back on his haunches as she spoke. "You— don't you dare treat this as _a kindness!_ You _took_ my reasons from me! You drove me to this, and now that you've won, you can't let me have that one choice left to me?"

 _I understand, Paalm,_ came the voice of God, the gentlest of scalpels as it carved her to pieces.

"You understand _nothing!_ " Paalm hissed. "You blinkered, arrogant tyrant. Let me _go._ " She tried to tear a spike free, but her hands wouldn't respond, which she had to admit was probably not _entirely_ Harmony's doing.

"My sister," TenSoon said. "We need to talk."

"I have nothing to say to you," Paalm snapped at TenSoon. "It's fitting you wear those bones. You're no more than his faithful hound, aren't you?"

"We all have masters," TenSoon said evenly.

"It— is— not— _passive!_ " Paalm screamed, or tried to and managed a hateful croak. "Things fall down because it is the way of things! When cadmium burns, time is slowed because it is the way of things! Control is a _choice!_ And it is a choice to allow ourselves to be controlled, do you understand me, TenSoon? The fact that you sit there, comfortable in your bones, and I'm shattered on the ground, trapped in myself? These are the results of choices, and exercise of power, and the fact that you haven't yet seen that is the great failure of our kind."

"Then I will say, instead, that my choices are ones I'm proud of," TenSoon said. "I feel as though I've made the world better for what I've done. Is that something that you can say?"

"I've been generally pleased with them so far, yeah," Paalm said. "When I've been allowed to make them, that is."

 _I have always tried to offer you choice, Paalm,_ God said. _The moments when I have not have been my greatest regrets._

"Then why am I not dead?" Paalm demanded.

_I don't know._

That, if nothing else, muffled Paalm's rage for a moment. "What?"

_I was prepared to let you die. Not happy about it, I admit, but I was ready to walk with you, to answer to you. But when you gave the command to yourself, it didn't take._

"You're lying."

_I don't think, though I have many flaws, that I have ever been a liar. My best guess is that your foreign spike played some role in the process. If I'm correct, it made you less kandra, and so what should have killed you only incapacitated you._

Well, wasn't that a mixed alloy. "Fine. Why am I not dead now? I've made my choice, shouldn't you be _honoring_ it?"

_I wanted to talk to you first. If you want, I will let you free, and you can face justice from the kandra, or you can take your own life, but please, Paalm, I just want to talk to you first._

"Why?"

 _Because I have been able to save so few people,_ God said, finally.

Indignant rage alloyed itself with utter bafflement. "You think you're going to save me?" Paalm demanded. "Your path, right? You think that here, at the end, I'll find religion?"

_I'm not talking about religion. I've never been...thrilled about the Path, but I feel comforted if people use my name and my legacy to better themselves. I don't imagine that it would be in your particular...ah, idiom._

"An excellent observation," Paalm snarled.

_But in a previous life, I offered counsel. And I could do that again, if you wanted._

And she got it. She understood what she needed to say, now.

"That's the heart of it, isn't it?" Paalm asked. "That you're nobody special. All you ever were was the last one standing, the one in the right place at the right time. Even your skills, your knowledge, they were just Feruchemy, weren't they? You could have been anyone. We kandra used to be Feruchemists, didn't we? I could have done it, built your new world for you. TenSoon— well, I wouldn't have asked him to do it; he'd have filled the whole thing with dogs."

_You don't feel, perhaps, that that's an unnecessarily harsh assessment?_

"...Sorry about that, TenSoon."

"I'd considered the possibility. After the Soonie pups, I'm no longer so sure," TenSoon said.

"They're rather cute, I always thought," Paalm drawled. "But you two were rebels among your people, I'd almost forgotten. You fought against everyone telling you to wait, to observe, to be _patient,_ that the savior would come along. When you saw that nobody would, you took that burden upon yourself. A familiar enough story, but judging by my current position, you seem to disagree. So, my duplicitous brother, but more importantly, _Sazed,_ vaunted _Hero of Ages..._ what gave you the rusted _right?_ "

There was silence for a long time, from both God and TenSoon.

When God's voice echoed through Paalm's mind again, it was no longer the knife. It was still smooth and kind, but it was dusty, like it hadn't been used properly in some time, and it was old in the way that humans were and that Paalm, for as long as she'd been alive, had never been. An age borne of feeling every waking minute of it all.

 _I don't know,_ Sazed said, for the second time, and he sounded very little like God in that moment. _I was only the one who was there. That's all that it was._

Paalm frowned, which she was allowed to do apparently. It was more than just the voice. Paalm knew voices. There was more to it. This was the curtain being pulled aside, and not entirely intentionally. More like the actor melting down mid-show.

"What is this?" Paalm asked.

_I have not, it seems, been entirely myself for some time now. Something about you, it would appear, has given me the presence of mind to change that._

"Really? You're trying that trick on a kandra? On _me_?"

Even as she said it, though, Paalm wove details together. Somehow, this wasn't a trick. She'd pierced a curtain she hadn't even known was there.

 _In spite of myself,_ Sazed murmured, _I have lost sight of things._

"Honesty. About time," Paalm said. "Maybe you didn't lie. But you were never on the level. It was always about the grand plan, with you."

 _Yes,_ said Sazed, with so much weariness that Paalm wanted to spit. _I needed Waxillium. I didn't realize what might happen— what almost certainly would happen, if I put you close together. I'm sorry._

"You cared about him," TenSoon said, almost wonderingly. "Why him?"

"Why Vin?" Paalm snapped. "Why her? What made anyone so important? I don't _know._ But when I worked with him, I felt like I wanted to be more than the mask. He made me feel— _I felt,_ when I was in the Roughs, when I was a lawman, more alive that I ever had. I loved him, then. I loved you."

A sensation from Sazed, of acceptance. _And then._

"And then you made me _watch,_ " Paalm spat.

_Ah._

"It was too much to hope that Wax would run, of course," Paalm growled. "He'd become such a good shot. Naturally, Bloody Tan would die. Naturally, my sweet Wax—" the words tangled on her lips, because they weren't words meant to be spoken in anger, "he stayed to mourn. He cradled me, Sazed, he buried me, and with every second I wanted to breathe in, to show him that his nightmare was only that, to reveal myself to him and to kiss him, touch him, just say goodbye or even _feel_ goodbye! And you made me _watch._ "

 _I did._ Sadness. A grief that made Paalm small.

Paalm would never, ever be small again.

"That was when I began to hate you," Paalm said, and she spoke past Sazed, to Harmony. "And I found that when I did, it made sense. That all I had to do to make the world make sense was to take the one quick step of realizing that you had ruined me. That you were still capable of ruin. That, in so many words, you could be wrong. That you were as much a choice as anything."

"You could have said something," TenSoon said. "Talked to us. We'd all had crises of faith at one point or another, during the fall of the Empire or during the Catacendre—"

"No!" Paalm shrieked. "I couldn't sit there and let you sympathize. Show how _sad_ you felt before sending me out to be your hands again! Something had to be done! And for your prattle about choice, about the importance of free will, you sent him after me! To shatter me again, to shatter him, so you could show your great cosmic grief, your overwhelming love of all of us, so you could build him back up as your weapon!"

"...You're not talking to me, are you?" TenSoon asked with a sigh.

"What are you, _really,_ brother? Can you look me in the eyes and tell me you're anything more than another mouthpiece of his? There to make him sound more reasonable?"

"I'm arguing my own opinion," TenSoon said drily. "Which is that you could have talked to us. Another choice you made, I think."

"I made the choice I did," Paalm said, "and I was barred from it. By Harmony's control."

_Paalm, your sanity was fraying—_

"Sanity," Paalm snarled, "is only the ability to participate in society and remain below notice. If your definition of insanity is that I would no longer dance to your tune—"

 _You killed people, Paalm. Did you think that I could let that go unchecked? Would my inaction have offered you the image of a caring god?_ Sazed sounded so miserable. Damn it.

"I killed people to free them from you," Paalm growled. "To free others from you. To show everyone that you were nothing more than a man given power. That _none_ of them were more than men given power."

Another long silence. For a moment, Paalm felt a brief spike of terror that Sazed had vanished. That she was talking to Harmony again. To the intent behind the man.

_And Idashwy?_

For a moment, Paalm didn't process what Sazed had just said. That was...that was a name. A Terris name. The name of…

Oh.

Paalm felt small again, and it had nothing to do with anybody but herself.

Sazed went on. _You said that you killed to free those under my control. To free everyone from the prisons I'd placed them in. Leaving aside the achievability of your goal, in what way had Idashwy not freed herself?_

Paalm had been familiar with a number of the more human emotions in her time. Rage was obvious. And grief. But there was joy, and vexation, and the peculiar feeling only experienced just after midnight, wandering a place not meant to be wandered without the glimmer of torches and gaslamps.

Shame was a new one.

 _Her departure from the traditions of her upbringing, her wandering into a brave new world and deciding that it was one of which she wished to be a part, in what way was that insufficiently liberated for your tastes?_ Sazed's voice was smooth and kind as ever, and Paalm felt all the worse for it. _You killed her for the sake of your mission, but don't pretend to me, please, that you understood her well enough to decide that she deserved to die alone, haunted and terrified. I walked with her, before she passed on. I talked to her. She asked me why she'd died, and I wasn't sure what to say. Should I have told her that she died for your higher purpose?  
_

"I…" She'd murdered someone seeking only what she'd sought. She'd bent others to her own will, in the Homelands.

_You did what you thought needed to be done. As I said before, I understand._

Paalm wished that she were able to move. She would have drawn in on herself, curled layer after layer of flesh over her bones, squeezed all of herself like a curled fist, crushed the consciousness out of herself.

_Paalm, is it alright if I ask TenSoon to leave?_

"Where's he going?" Paalm asked, hating the note of desperation in her voice, only centuries of practice giving her speech at all.

_Just outside. I thought you might appreciate privacy._

Paalm shook her head. Another thing she was able to do, it seemed. "No. I...it's nice having him around."

"I can hear you," TenSoon pointed out.

"It's nice having you around."

"Even if I'm nothing more than a faithful hound?" TenSoon asked.

"Don't push it," Paalm said.

_Yes, this would be part of why I wanted to have this conversation with just you._

But as TenSoon padded over, and laid down his huge shaggy head across Paalm's shattered body, Paalm chalked up another example of Sazed being wrong.

"...Thank you, brother."

TenSoon growled softly, and the vibration was soothing. Not that Paalm had bothered generating a proper sense of touch, but the bone fragments that infused her hummed with the sound, a core of brief comfort.

"I never wanted you to die," he said.

"What?" Paalm asked.

"None of us did," TenSoon said. "MeLaan said as much, when Wax and his troupe asked...before they knew who you were," he added, as if he could sense the spike of outrage that bubbled up in Paalm. "There are so few left of the Third Generation. So few of us at all. You're precious to us." His voice sent more ripples through Paalm. She had to admit, as annoying as the dog form was at the moment, dogs had their uses. "We wanted to help you. I wanted to help you."

Paalm swallowed, generating the muscle to manage it as she did. "...A fine job you're doing of it," she said, but the words sounded hollow even to her.

"I'm glad you're alive, Paalm," TenSoon said.

Paalm's current arrangement of tissues lacked tear ducts. She hadn't bothered with them.

"...What was it you wanted to say?" Paalm asked Sazed.

_I don't wish to talk to you as god and messenger. Nor as confessor and sinner. Friend to friend, I imagine, is not an option. But from one person who has done wrong, to another. From one person changed by the mantle they wore, to another. From one person who grieves, to another._

_I'm sorry._

Paalm stared. Not _at_ anything, because Sazed wasn't in the room. But she assumed that the sentiment came across.

_We could exchange words back and forth about who did what, for what reason, and to what degree it was effective. We could debate what happened, and who owes what to whom. But at the end of the day, I have always felt that when I have done wrong, it is best to try and rectify it. I hurt you, and I would like to try and right that wrong. That begins by listening._

"I...when I realized that you'd been wrong, it was myself that I hated first," Paalm said, and she found that her arms could move, as she stroked TenSoon's fur. "Because I'd been acting on your orders. And before you, I acted on the orders of the Lord Ruler. If you thought that Idashwy was bad...I've killed thousands personally, so many whose only crime was being in my way. Tens of thousands more via the consequences of my actions. Famines for disobedient provinces. Poisoned water supplies. Destabilized resistance organizations. If you and yours had been a hair less clever, I would have been the one sent to destroy you all, and the Final Empire would never have fallen, I promise you."

_Thankfully, you weren't._

"I'd done so many things, and I told myself that it was only what needed to be done, on behalf of someone who knew. But then it turned out that you could be wrong. Which meant that every time I had made the choice to obey, I had been obeying...a man. A man who had held great knowledge, but a man nonetheless. In your case, a man far younger than me. Someone who could make mistakes, hurt people without cause, lose sight of the little things. And I realized that I bore that responsibility. That everything I had done was my own. And I hurt. Everything I'd felt as I came alive, there out in the Roughs, it closed in on me and it tore me to pieces. And in that moment, as my heart and faith shattered, I became free."

"And I started to realize that you were as much to blame as I was. I'd operated on your behalf, but your distance from what I'd done didn't absolve you. And there were so many people in the world, dancing to your tune. Suffering or fulfilled, they weren't free. And Wax was the symbol of that, as much as he was your symbol. I wanted to burn it all. Burn him. And I was so sure that something better might rise from the ashes."

That was when she'd torn out her spike, and hidden herself from Harmony. Trell had come later, but that had only been a resource, a little push in the right direction.

It was funny, how much an absence stung in retrospect. Her plan had started out with the best of intentions, maybe, but she'd lost sight of how to make it work. Lost sight of the little things.

"And then you took me back into yourself, and there was only one choice left to me. What else was I supposed to do?" 

_I don't know, Paalm. And I'm sorry to have put you in that position._

"But you would have done it anyway, if you had known what it would do to me," Paalm said. "Because you needed your Dawnshot."

_I like to think that if I had known, I wouldn't have. But I can't be sure, not anymore._

There was a third presence in the room. A Terrisman in formal robes, tall and thin and cleanly turned-out, sitting cross-legged on the stone, head bowed with years of exhaustion.

Paalm sat with him for several silent minutes, in quiet mutual understanding of failure.

_If I gave you control of yourself, Paalm, would you still want to die? Would you return to your campaign of destruction?_

Paalm tested her thoughts before she spoke, looking for the telltale signs of emotional Allomancy. She found none.

"The latter, no. The former...it's hard to tell. I've done things that I would be sentenced to death for, unless kandra law has updated itself substantially in my absence. Even without that, I'd be a prisoner."

"That isn't necessarily true," TenSoon said.

"Don't make me laugh; I don't have the lungs for it yet," Paalm snapped. "There would be no trusting me. I won't live like that again, do you understand?"

_I do. But there's a third option._

"Really."

_The option is that, after the faith you've placed in me, I place some in you._

"Explain." Paalm hadn't left her heart in the normal place, letting it drift down towards her leg instead. She could feel it twitch, now.

_You go free. You take a new True Body, a new face...a new you. And you leave, and you find your own way forwards, without my directions, without any higher power ordering you around._

Oh.

"But...you don't know what I would do. What if I went back to killing people?"

_Then that would be your choice. And my response would be mine, and the city's response would be their choices. They've been better prepared for a kandra, of course. I wouldn't give you good odds, if I were a betting man._

"A threat, then. A sword hanging over my head, if I step out of line."

_As little of one as I can muster. You would have an aluminum skeleton, blessings of Presence— as much resistance to Allomancy as a kandra can have. You'd be as free as anyone is._

"You would always know where I was. What I do. You would be able to take control of me at any time. There's no way past that."

_No, there isn't. If I were at the crest of my power, I could have made you human, perhaps. Left you as independent as anyone is. But I can't. This is, unfortunately, the best that I can offer you._

Paalm's first instinct was to say that no, it wasn't enough, and that she would take death.

It was the Blessing of Presence, she supposed, that saved her life. That, and her difficulty speaking. The words came slowly, and her thoughts moved faster.

She looked down at TenSoon, curled up in her lap. Glanced at the bowed-over figure of Sazed, Harmony, her all-too-human god.

She thought about how it had felt, to be a part of something that made a difference.To help, even to help _badly._

She had more to offer the world. More to experience from it.

"I'll...I don't know what I'll do. I don't have a plan for this."

TenSoon growled softly, sending another vibration through Paalm. "A common problem."

_Few do. The downside of freedom. Though I know very few who would exchange it._

"It's more than that. There's...how can I go forward? How do I keep going, after everything?"

Sazed, on the floor in front of Paalm, placed his hands up to his face, head bowing deeper.

_Before I was Harmony, there was a woman._

_Her name was Tindwyl. Like me, she was a Keeper, and a Feruchemist. She joined us, in the aftermath of the Collapse._

"I've heard of her," Paalm said. "The Promenade's named after her, isn't it?"

_That's correct._

"...You and her?" Paalm demanded.

A silence from Sazed. _She made me feel truly alive, for the first time. And when she died, it shattered me. For so long, I looked at the world, and I couldn't reconcile it as anything that could make sense._

He fell silent, and grief radiated from him, a grief held fresh and warm three hundred years later.

"And what did you do about it?"

_I tried to make everyone hurt as I had._

"Ah."

_It wasn't practical. But I found meaning again._

"How?"

_I saw what people were capable of. I found new things to believe in. It was a personal journey. I'm not offering advice, only...reassurance. You'll find something, someday._

_You just have to keep going._

—-

Paalm stood in the station as the train came in. Instinctively, she adjusted her ears, making them less sensitive to the sounds of the engine.

She wore her new True Body, an aluminum skeleton a little taller than the crystalline bones she'd used as Lessie and as Bleeder. She'd wrapped a face around it not too unlike Lessie's, with light brown skin and eyes, square features, and dark bobbed hair. Indistinguishable from any of the hundreds of other people teeming out of the train now coming into the station, bound for Elendel.

She glanced up at the sky. Not that there was any particular reason for Harmony to be there, but Paalm liked the sky. The colors were interesting, and it apparently took more than three hundred years to get used to them.

"Please...look after him."

 _Do you want me to let him know you're alive?_ Harmony was no longer Sazed, but had held to their deal anyway. Paalm wasn't sure what that meant for the two of them going forward, but she was trying for the time being to focus on the now.

For a moment, Paalm could see her future, as though she'd tried burning electrum. She could see herself, reunited with Wax by Harmony, becoming Lessie again. The only self she'd had that had ever been more than a shadow of a person.

But he had a life without her. The holes left behind by her had been patched, woven over, and an unexpected addition could be as destructive as an unexpected subtraction.

"...It'd only cause him more pain, wouldn't it?" Paalm said.

_I think, on balance, that it would._

From a perspective of logic, irrespective of the truth, Harmony should have said yes. Paalm's reentry into Waxillium Ladrian's life would, regardless of any emotional consequence, create complications in Harmony's plan for him. Paalm was not an adherent to Harmony's plan. Paalm didn't like Harmony. Paalm had tried to kill Wax and all of his loved ones. And Paalm still loved Wax. None of that created a recipe for stability in Harmony's chosen weapon.

Or, Paalm had to admit, a remotely stable situation.

In that moment, Paalm decided to try having faith again.

"Yeah. I get it."

A year after she'd been shot in the head, Lessie died.

_I would ask only one favor of you, Paalm._

Instinctively, Paalm let her flesh erupt in goosebumps. "We'll see."

_Try to enjoy yourself._

And Harmony's voice faded from her mind.

Paalm stood in the station, surrounded by strange purposeless specks, alone in her mind for the first time, devoid herself of purpose for the first time. She laughed a little, for the first time doing it because she felt entertained and not because it seemed like the right thing to do for the face she wore.

And she thought, absent influence of anything—

_Well, Ruin, what now?_

**Author's Note:**

> -the title is from Genesis 32:26. That's how pretentious I am going to be today.  
> -Originally "men with power" was supposed to be, like, humans, people, hnau, etc. But it turns out all the people Paalm has worked for were actually men! So if I wasn't supposed to make Paalm feminist Sanderson shouldn't have instituted a patriarchy.  
> -No textual evidence suggests Paalm and TenSoon have a particularly close relationship, but I feel like they should and so Paalm gets dog cuddles  
> -I don't really know how many people Paalm's killed personally or otherwise but considering that she was shooting people in the Roughs even when she was working for Harmony, and before that she was a favored spy for a totalitarian despot, I feel like the answer is probably a lot  
> -Paalm's done a lot of shit, is my point, and absolutely I don't think she should be let off the hook for that  
> -But also Paalm rights  
> -I don't know what's up with Trell so…[shrug]


End file.
